The Ultimate Guide to Infographics

“A picture is worth a thousand words…”

Utilizing Infographics To Get Published on Authority Sites – Why You Should Create Infographics with Authority Sites in Mind and Not Your Audience

More likely than not, getting an authority site to include an infographic you make is much, MUCH easier than them posting a guest article you write. And getting published on an authority site will bring you direct targeted traffic, add to your brand, and give you a quality link.

And since authority sites are often visited by other webmasters in your niche, you have a good chance that your infographic will be syndicated by others that found it on the authority site.

When thinking about creating an infographic, consider what authority sites in your niche would like to post, and don’t necessarily design for your audience. Your goal is to get your infographic on authority sites that will not only send you traffic, but also give you a quality link.

Go to authority sites and see if you can find their most popular articles and brainstorm if you can come up with an infographic that would be related.

Also, try to use a statistic from an authority site and cite that site in your infographic. By including the URL of the authority site in your infographic, you greatly the chances they will publish your graphic.

Make “Award” Infographics

Another way to increase the odds your infographic will be published on authority sites is to create an “award-type” infographic. Folks like to brag about awards and if you can create a great-looking infographic that mentions authority sites, they will be more likely to publish your infographic.

For example, if you are in the “pet” niche, can you come up with an infographic that is a compilation of:

Best dog training site

Grumpiest cat video

Funniest pet page

…etc.

Be creative with the categories. Contact the winners and let them know about your infographic. Be sure to tell them how much you love their site and wanted to show your appreciation for the work they do. Flattery will get you much better results.

Using PowerPoint for Multi-Media Marketing

Infographics can really be marketing powerhouses as they can be included in a variety of media, each with its own marketing resources.

And using PowerPoint to create infographics gives you lots of flexibility, as Powerpoint allows you to export your slideshows into a variety of different formats, including video, PDF, ppx, doc, jpg and more. And there are powerful marketing opportunities for each media type.

Using Powerpoint to create an infographic. You can:

Create a an animated infographic and convert to video for video marketing. Submit to:

Infographics are great to use on Pinterest. Not only can they go viral and be “repinned”, by creating your own infographics you are in good shape concerning copyright laws. (Assuming you don’t use any copyright protected material in your infographics)

Pinterest Suggestion: Recipes are “fair use” and can’t be copyright protected, only the presentation can. Be creative and make a list of ingredients, then use a “mind map” to turn recipes into infographics. Maybe add a photo or clip art to dress it up. You can do the same thing with many step by step “how to’s”. Be sure to put them in your own words and create an entirely new graphic presentation using mind map software.

Twitter Images – When 140 characters isn’t enough. Twitter Images allows you to post images and infographics are a great way to publish more info that you can post in a normal tweet.

A Quick, Easy, Effective and Free Marketing Strategy For Infographics, (and All Images And Pictures You Own)

The image sharing site Flickr can send you tons of traffic. So can Pinterest.

So let’s combine the two. Post your images on Flickr. Remember basic SEO principles and use your most popular keywords in your titles, image file names, tags, descriptions, etc. Focus on major keywords and don’t worry about the competition.

Google Image Search – Image searches can deliver some serious Google traffic and give you another weapon in your marketing arsenal. Images included in your web pages not only make them look better and add a multi-media element (which likely aids SEO), the images themselves can be optimized to help with Google ranking.

Make It Easy for Webmasters to Use Your Infographic: When you post an infographic on your site or blog, make sure you include the HTML code in a way that makes it easy for webmasters to copy and paste on their own sites. Keep in mind basic SEO principles and be sure to include the basic “optimized” HTML in your code.

List of Sites to Submit InfographicsVisual.ly– Visual.ly not only is a great free site for creating infographics, it’s also probably the best place to submit your infographic in the hope it will be syndicated by other sites. Not only does Visually give you a chance to get your infographic picked up by others, your infographic page can get decent Page Rank and is a dofollow links.

Visually is also a great place to look for inspiration. While you can’t copy an infographic design, you can “borrow” ideas to create your own original work. Also, check out a category that’s closest to your niche and check out the most popular infographics for that niche.

This list includes PageRank of the homepage and includes sites that have dofollow links. The list is kind of old, so some sites may be dead or have changed how they link.

Free Infographics and Visualization Tools You Need to Know

Visual.ly – Again, Visually is probably the #1 site for any infographic marketer. Create, share, publish infographics and visuals. Connect your account to Facebook and Twitter and much more. Visual.ly is a “must checkout”!

ManyEyes – Probably my favorite infographic resource. A great site by IBM that allows you to create “visualizations” using either your own data or data stored on the site. You can choose different styles, fonts, colors and more to display your infographics.

How to Use Many Eyes

Google Data Sets – Similar to ManyEyes, but not quite as good, IMO. Still, a good resource to check out.

Intro to Google Public Data Sets

Wordly – Another favorite. Just add some text and Wordly creates a visualization. Uses a “word cloud” so the more times a word is used in the text, the bigger it will appear. It can also import RSS feeds. Note: Wordly uses Java to create the images. This means you can’t save the image directly to your computer. However, it the Wordly license it says it’s OK to take a screen shot and save it that way.

Tagxedo – A very good text visualization tool similar to Wordly, but with many more features and controls. The problem with Tagxedo is the usage license, which is for non-commercial use only. The TOS also states they own the copyright to the images created and add a copyright notice to the bottom of each graphic. If you are OK with this, Tagxedo produces some very cool results.

StatSilk – (Formally called “Stat Planet”) Has a number of free downloads to help creating infographics focusing on world maps and countries of the World. Download page

yED – A good, free flow chart creator and will run on Windows, Unix/Linux, and Mac OS. See yED in action in the short video below:

Make Sweet – Easy and fun way to make 3D Venn diagrams consisting of two over-lapping circles.

MakeSweet Basics

Gapminder – Adobe Air based program so it will run on Windows, Mac and Linux. Creates impressive visualizations and includes a self-updating data base of World facts and statistics.
Creately.com – An online flowchart creator with some good looking templates. Free version is limited to 5 diagrams a month. Can upgrade your account to unlimited diagrams for $5 a month.

Creately Tutorial (Note: Collaborations aren’t available in the free version)

yUML – Makes UML/Mind maps and Flowcharts for use in web pages and blogs

Data, Statistics and Content Resources and Suggestions

Copyrights – Statistics and facts can’t be protected by copyrights, only the presentation of those facts can be protected. By creating your own infographics and visuals using facts and statistics, you are creating a new and unique presentation for them.

Here’s a quic kand easy tip to help you create infographics and visualizations: I like creating infographics from lists. And a great way to find lists is to use the Google “site” command and enter Wikipedia.org for the site.

The following will give you general results for lists:

“list of” site:wikipedia.org

(just paste into Google)

Another option is to include a keyword to give you more precise results, such as:

“list of guitarists” site:wikipedia.org

(paste into Google)

It’s easy to come up with a list of people, places and things that are great for infographics.

A good way to exploit the possibility of your infographic going viral is to plan ahead for the anniversary of historical events. Here’s a Wikipedia page that links to historical events so you can plan ahead:

More Free Map Resources

More Content Ideas for Infographics:

Do a Google for Ideas – Search Google for infographics in your niche:

“my keywords” + infographic

Use the regular search, video search and the image search to expand your results.

Quotes and Jokes/Humor – There’s many good sites with collections of jokes and quotes, and I won’t list them here. However, they make great content for infographics and often can go viral on social sites like Pinterest and Twitter.

Images

Pixabay – Probably the biggest and best source for public domain pictures and images.

Morguefile.com – While the images on MorgueFile aren’t in the public domain, they do offer the most liberal usage license of any of the only picture sharing sites. You can use them for just about anything and you don’t even need to give attribution. Be sure to read the Morguefile license here.

PublicDomainPictures.net – Has a great selection of free quality pictures, backgrounds, lighting effects and more for personal and commercial use.

Ratings – Create info graphics for Amazon products and be sure to include an appealing graphic. However, be careful about using product pictures themselves, as they may be copyright protected. Instead, create a chart or graph of the average ratings for two or more products, for example.

Trends – Trends are great to convert to infographics. Here’s a few ideas to find and exploit popular trends:

GraphicRiver.net– Graphic River sells infographics mostly intended for print. IMO, their license is a little expensive and restrictive to use for Pinterest and other web project, unless you need something of very high quality. However, it’s free to browse and a great resource to help stimulate your creative design juices. Check it out if you need some design inspiration. Here’s a search I did on GraphicsRiver for Infographics
123rf.com infographic templates – Also sells vector-based templates for infographics. Another good source of inspiration.

YouTube is always a great place to learn and discover…Here’s a couple of “infographics” related YouTube searches:

More Infographic Resources

12 options for creating cartoon characters – Cartoon-ize: Want to include a pic of a celebrity or famous person in your infographic, and still respect copyright laws? Maybe “cartoon-izing” that person is the answer. Or create cartoon look-alikes…Here’s a web page that reviews to use in your infographics.

Jashaka.com – Jashaka is a free program similar to Adobe After Effects, which creates animations and special effects for videos. If you want to animate your infographics and create videos for them for Youtube, etc, without paying for After Effects, give Jashaka a look. The program hasn’t been updated in a few years, but a new version is expected to be released in the summer of 2012. Also be sure to visit Youtube for Jashaka tutorials.

Free Infographic Vector Design Kit – I had problems getting the download link when I gave my email address. But give it a shot, it looks pretty cool. From the site: “Included in this set is a world map, gender elements, as well as multiple pie and bar charts. You can easily combine and modify all the elements to create a distinctive infographic. The elements in the kit can be used for personal and commercial purposes.”

5 Free Vector Image Programs – This site reviews the 5 best vector image programs. You are probably more familiar with paint programs, such as Photoshop, Gimp and Windows Paint. But when creating infographics, you may have a need to be able to work with vector images. I won’t get into detail, but there’s two ways to create images on a computer The most common is called paint/raster. The other method is called draw/vector. Simply, “paint” uses pixels and you can control it on a pixel by pixel basis. “Draw” or vector uses math to draw lines and curves.

After you choose a program (I suggest Inkscape), you can find all sorts of tutorials on Youtube.